UNFCC COP29 kicks off today in Azerbaijan, an oil-producing, authoritarian state. What could negotiations this year, mean for food and farming?  Our co-lead, Prof Tim Benton, has spent much of his career working with governments around the world on climate change and food system transformation. He's been to many COPs and gives his assessment here:

What could COP29 mean for food and farming? 

Probably the headline is that it won’t mean anything for food and farming. The overall Azerbaijan approach is to drive up ambition and to make some degree of progress on finance. But in a world that’s fiscally constrained, everybody’s passing the buck: The Global South is saying that the money’s got to come from the Global North, and the Global North is saying, it doesn’t have any money – and how about China, or the private sector? So no one’s getting very far on that.

The Azeris also want to finish all of the formal negotiations about how to run the Paris Agreement (Article Six), including on how carbon markets work. But it is a bit like [when COP28 was hosted by] UAE, in the sense that it’s a small government, it doesn’t have huge capacity to do the kind of diplomatic effort [needed] and all of these things are immensely political.

When [the UK hosted] COP26, there was a huge amount of [diplomatic] effort behind the scenes in the run up [to the conference], not just by us, but by others too. I think that diplomacy work has not been done, and so, going into the meeting itself, it’s unlikely there’ll be anything other than a whole lot of things that are still yet to be agreed. And so the actual ambition levels for the COP as a whole are weak and we should manage our expectations.

With respect to food [and farming], there is a sustainable agriculture and water day like there often is at COP, where there will be a number of governments wanting to champion their achievements etc. But because it’s not part of the formal negotiations, nothing will really get done within the formal negotiations about agriculture. If you look back to what happened in Dubai last year, the food day [led to] the Emirates declaration, but that hasn’t led to very much at all. So the actual meat of what might be done is relatively small.

How will Azerbaijan being host influence things? 

It’s an authoritarian government in a small state in Eastern Europe. Probably they don’t have a lot of diplomatic depths because they don’t do diplomacy, because they’re authoritarian. They probably aren’t very good at negotiating in contested areas, again, because they’re authoritarian, and it’s a small state.

The Emirates were quite surprised [last year] about the scale of the enterprise needed – there is an awful lot of work that goes on between COPs in terms of the intersessionals and the stock taking phases and the ministerial get togethers, etc – there’s a whole calendar of things that go on.

But if you just turn up at those meetings without having done a whole lot of one-to-one bilateral negotiations, then you just get overwhelmed by the differences of opinion. The [progress] really happens when there is strong leadership, and you go into those meetings with something which is already an outline of an agreement. [Otherwise you’ll] still be arguing like you have been all year.

And of course, Azerbaijan is an oil producer and it’s not going to turn around and say “we are really going to drive forward”. What was signalled at COP28 about withdrawing from fossil fuels is all going to be slightly smoke and mirrors and talk of “investing in the circular carbon economy”, or whatever they’re calling it these days, [which just means] sucking carbon dioxide out of fossil fuel chimneys. We are essentially passing 1.5C, and once we’ve gone past it and are accelerating towards 2C, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to pull it back.

Is there more hope with COP30 in Brazil next year?

Yes. Brazil is ambitious to take a place of global leadership, and it’s big enough to become the emerging diplomatic and economic powerhouse of the Global South, in a way that China has become over the last 20 or 30 years, and India, with its big population.

Brazil doesn’t have the kind of economic heft yet of India or China, but in terms of all of the countries in the Global South, it’s got the resources, it’s got the space, it’s got the population, and it’s got the ambition to stand up, be a global leader and think about what sustainable development really means from a low or middle income country perspective, as opposed to, what the Global North thinks sustainable development means.

President Lula has got a lot of political capital: [There’s] the Amazon and biodiversity, the enormity of the agricultural sector and its exports, yet most people in Brazil are fed by smallholder farmers. So Brazil has an interesting jewel of an agricultural system.

[It faces questions such as] how do you modernise smallholder agriculture using modern technologies, without destroying the ability of family farms to continue farming against the kind of weight of big consolidated farms? Yet at the same time, they want to have the big consolidated farms so that they can export soy to China and make the most of it.

So Brazil is inherently much more tuned into [exploring] what sustainable climate and smart food systems look like, both from a small holder and a big farming perspective, and while not encroaching too much into forests.

And so I think they’ve intrinsically got more ability and ambition to drive COP ahead next year. And the reason COP30  is in Manaus, halfway up the Amazon River, is because Lula said people ought to come into Amazonia and be exposed to what Amazonia is really about, and learn what it means. And so you can see the thinking, whereas Azerbaijan was parachuted in because we needed to have an Asian COP, and nobody wanted to step forward.